‘Lucky Boy!’; Public Perceptions of Child Sexual Offending Committed by Women

This exploratory study addresses the existing gaps on the public perceptions of child sexual offending committed by women. Using thematic analysis, the study extracted, coded and analysed the comments ( N = 1,651) made by the general public to nine Daily Mail online newspaper articles published from 2018 to 2019, reporting the sentencing decisions of female sex offenders, who have been charged and found guilty with the offence of sexual activity with a child. From those comments, 170 coded themes were identified, and this amounted to 3,394 coded incidences. Unlike previous research, this study cross-examines public responses to different typologies of offending behaviour; teachers, mothers, same sex offenders, co-offenders and finally those who offended for financial gain. The impact of these typologies was analysed through key descriptive case variables, which were quantitively evaluated against the prominent themes that emerged. It found that while people demand equal sentencing decisions between male and female child sex offenders, this is limited by public perception when the abuser is an attractive female and, as a result, perceived as less harmful to the child, who is not seen no longer as a victim but as a ‘Lucky Boy’. Such preconceptions fuel shame, social stigma and stereotyping towards sexual exposure and prevents victims to disclose their abuse and achieve closure and justice.

CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis against sex pheromone biosynthesis leads to loss of female attractiveness in Spodoptera exigua, an insect pestt

Virgin female moths are known to release sex pheromones to attract conspecific males. Accurate sex pheromones are required for their chemical communication. Sex pheromones of Spodoptera exigua, a lepidopteran insect, contain unsaturated fatty acid derivatives having a double bond at the 12th carbon position. A desaturase of S. exigua (SexiDES5) was proposed to have dual functions by forming double bonds at the 11th and 12th carbons to synthesize Z9,E12-tetradecedienoic acid, which could be acetylated to be a main sex pheromone component Z9,E12-tetradecenoic acetate (Z9E12-14:Ac). A deletion of SexiDES5 using CRISPR/Cas9 was generated and inbred to obtain homozygotes. Mutant females could not produce Z9E12-14:Ac along with Z9-14:Ac and Z11-14:Ac. Subsequently, pheromone extract of mutant females did not induce a sensory signal in male antennae. They failed to induce male mating behavior including hair pencil erection and orientation. In the field, these mutant females did not attract any males while control females attracted males. These results indicate that SexiDES5 can catalyze the desaturation at the 11th and 12th positions to produce sex pheromone components in S. exigua. This study also suggests an application of the genome editing technology to insect pest control by generating non-attractive female moths.

THE ROLE OF FACIAL ATTRACTIVENESS AND GENDER ON CHANGE DETECTION AND RECOGNITION MEMORY

This study aimed to investigate the effect of automatic attentional bias on change detection and recognition memory performance. In this context, attractive faces, which have priority in attention selection, were used as stimuli. The data of 110 participants were analyzed (54 females, 56 males, Mage = 20.87 ± 1.80). As a result, there was a significant effect of attractiveness [F(2.73, 295.16) = 37.33, p < .001, ƞp2 = .26] and model gender [F(1, 108) = 6.47, p < .05, ƞp2 = .06] on change detection performance. Accordingly, the fastest performance is when only the target was an attractive female; the slowest performance was observed when only the distractors were attractive female. On the other hand, the data of 94 participants (46 females, 48 males, Mage = 21.05 ± 1.95) were analyzed for the recognition memory. Accordingly, low memory performance was generally observed. Memory sensitivity was significantly lower for attractive faces (-.31) than average-looking ones (.59). Besides, bias to respond “old” for attractive faces were higher than average-looking faces for both model genders. Therefore, the findings suggest that the decision criterion was more liberal for attractive faces (for females -.06, for males -.46) than average faces (for females .15, for males .33). On the other hand, there was no significant effect of the participant gender on both attention and memory tasks (p > .05). The study is the first known change detection and recognition memory study to examine participant gender, model gender, and attractiveness together. The limitations of the study and suggestions for future studies are handled in the discussion section.

Attractiveness, Trust and Trustworthiness: An Experimental Study

Trust and reciprocating trust are two vital elements in any interpersonal relation. In a situation when there is no reputational information, people have been found to rely on physical cues, such as gender, race, attractiveness, facial expression and others to deduce trustworthiness of other parties. The present paper investigated this stereotype in a trust game by incorporating facial attractiveness. What we were interested in was the impact of attractiveness on trustors’ trust on trustees and trustworthiness of the trustees. The main contribution of the paper is that it investigated the associations using a five-person trust game and allowed the trustors to evaluate the attractiveness of the trustee. The design allowed us to establish the causal association between individuals’ perception on attractiveness and transfer more directly. The results showed male trustors ranked the same female trustees higher than female trustors in terms of attractiveness, and this was translated to higher transferred amount from male trustors to the trustees. Additionally, we find male trustors transferred significantly larger amount to more attractive female trustees than less attractive trustees, but there was no such difference among female trustors. However, the kindness extended by the male trustors to the more attractive female trustees were not reciprocated by the trustees. The trustworthiness as measured by the amount transferred back by trustees was not significantly different between less and more attractive trustees. The results highlighted systematic bias in decision making when prior information about the partners was not available.

Paris « aux bains de mer » L’invention médiatique d’une mondanité balnéaire dans la revue La Vie parisienne (1863-1885)

Launched in England, the fashion of sea bathing spreads over France in the course of the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the development of seaside resorts as well as of the railway network. Henceforth, sea bathing becomes widely publicized in media culture. La Vie parisienne depicts it as an essential feature of the fanciful worldly life tirelessly promoted by this illustrated magazine founded in 1863 by the French cartoonist Marcelin. And thus, sea bathing gets adorned with a somewhat frivolous – not to say lecherous touch, leaving far away therapeutic concerns the practice originated from. It also widely contributes to widespread the cliché of an eternally young and attractive female body, personified by the « high life Parisienne », a character consubstantial with the magazine’s identity.

The influence of romantic partners on male risk-taking

Studies show that young men’s tendency to take risks may be exacerbated or attenuated in different social contexts. Despite widespread evidence that social context influences young men’s risk-taking, few studies have examined the impact of romantic partners on risky decision-making. The present study examined risk-taking among young men in relationships with women ( n = 134, ages 18–24) randomly assigned to be tested alone ( n = 47), in the presence of their romantic partner ( n = 44), or in the presence of an attractive female stranger ( n = 43). The presence of a romantic partner diminished young men’s tendency to take risks. Findings demonstrate that a dampening effect on risk-taking is attributable to the romantic partner’s presence and not merely due to knowledge of being in a relationship.

Semantic transfers in the domain of FOODSTUFFS

In recent literature scholars have worked out a number of new categories of meaning development such as zoosemy, plantosemy and foodsemy. This paper focuses on the mechanism of foodsemy, a new category of metaphorical extension proposed by Kleparski (2008), and in particular on the cases of metaphorical extension that are targeted at human beings and their various qualities. Most frequently, the process discussed here involves the projection of attributive features and values, sometimes positive, yet most frequently negative ones, associated with members of the macrocategory foodstuffs onto the macrocategory human being. The purpose here is to outline a limited number of metaphorical transfers involved in the conceptual macrocategory foodstuffs targeted at such subcategories of the microcatergory female human being as attractive female human being, immoral female human being and female breasts. For some language users it may sound somewhat unnatural, and hence unacceptable, to name a female person mutton with the intended metaphorical sense ‘a prostitute’, tomato applied in the transferred sense ‘attractive, but not a very wise female’ or peach, which denotes an ‘attractive female, especially in American English’. However, cases of foodsemy are nothing else, but instances of metaphorical conceptualizations, which are considered to be pervasive, unconscious and automatic. They are also universal, though different lexical items in different languages may acquire different metaphorical senses.

DIFFERENCE IN CRANIOFACIAL CHARACTERISTICS IN ATTRACTIVE MALE AND FEMALE FACES

Beauty, or more precisely, the art that is hidden in the creation of human face has always attracted great interest and has been a research point in many areas. Contemporary orthodontic is science which is trying to stady human face throught mesurable and objective parameters. Since ancient cultures and societies, huge attention has been focused on facial aesthetics and phisical atractivness. Today, phisical atractivness in both male and female continues to be much more highlited and the interest for facial aesthetics is growing.The aim of this study is to determine the influence of the gender on skeleton-facial characteristics(Sagittal jaw relationship, vertical jaw relationship and profile convexity) between attractive male and female faces. The study was performed on 54 attractive individuals (18 males and 36 females) ranging in age between 14-25 years. Facial attractiveness was assessed by using an-face photographs examined by a panel of 50 students. For ranking facial attractiveness VAS-Visual Analog Scale was used. Craniofacial morphology was determined by using lateral head film. Cephalometric analyses included measuring of sagittal jaw relationship, vertical jaw relationship and profile convexity. The data obtained from cephalometric analyses were compared between the two groups. Results in this study reveals that when comparing attractive males with attractive females, the attractive Macedonian males had larger SNB angle(p<0.001) and SNPg (p<0.05), or more precisely anterior positioned mandible with prominence of the chin. There was statistically significant difference for the angle ANB(P<0.001) i Wits(p<0.01) confirming the presence of biger profile convexity (NSPg p<0.001 i NsSnPgs p<0.001) in attractive female individuals that shows the existance of the sex dimorphism. Based on our findings we can concluded that more flat profiles are preferred today, actually perception of an ideal male profile in modern times is flat profile with smaller dominance of the nose and more convex profiles in attractive female faces

Are attractive female voices really best characterized by feminine fundamental and formant frequencies?

Research into the characteristics of attractive women’s voices has focused almost exclusively on associations with fundamental or formant frequencies. A recent study of a small sample of voices used a bottom-up approach to identify acoustic characteristics associated with women’s vocal attractiveness, finding that many acoustic characteristics other than fundamental or formant frequencies predicted women’s vocal attractiveness. Here we will replicate their methodology with a much larger sample of voices (N = 450) in order to identify vocal characteristics that reliably predict women’s vocal attractiveness. Identifying such traits will provide new insights into and avenues for study of the possible function of vocal attractiveness.